The present invention is related to the field of caller identification and identification of message senders; commonly described as “caller ID services” in this document. More specifically, the present invention pertains to a method that enables the identification of unwanted callers or message senders with restricted communication devices or applications.
For the purpose of this document, an “unwanted” caller or message sender shall be defined as a personal or commercial contact, that a user wants to avoid or prefers to have no interaction with, via a incoming or outgoing phone call or messaging for reasons of personal preference or privacy.
For the purpose of this document, a “restricted communication device or application” is a device or application, which do not expose APIs (Application Program Interface) for programmatically accessing its call and message stack, either in real time (as calls or messages arrive or as calls are dialed or messages are sent), or by accessing the call or message history/log. Additional restrictions are imposed where a communications device limits the user to the device's default caller ID service at time of a call or message event. At the time of writing one example of such a “restricted device” is Apple's iPhone. One example of such a “restricted application” commonly described as “Instant Messaging application” or “IM application”, is WhatsApp for iOS.
The majority of related art in the field services relies on communication devices' or applications' ability to expose details of an incoming call or message for providing additional caller ID and caller information services, however such methods fail in restricted environments as described in the immediately preceding paragraph.
Further shortcomings of related art is caused by dependencies on the communication device or application's ability to replace or multitask the default caller ID service with its own user interface, again such methods fail in restricted environments as described above.
Other related art for providing caller ID identifications requires network components such as switches, routers or other additional devices to which calls and messages are diverted prior or in parallel to being delivered to the designated receivers. Such methods fail where accessing additional components are technically inaccessible.
Instead this present invention utilizes the comminations devices' default caller ID service. Caller ID service rely on a phone number being transmitted together with each call or message. If the transmitted number matches a record in the device contacts list (frequently referred to as address book), the device's default caller ID service replaces the number with the name of the contact. This allows a user to recognize contacts without remembering their individual phone numbers. However, if no match for a transmitted phone number can be found in the user's contact list, no name can be shown and the actual transmitted number is shown instead. At this point the user may a) answer the call or message to find what it is about or b) ignore the call or message and possibly research the number manually.
While researching the number, users frequently find that there are numbers, especially from the 800-service area code, which are used by telemarketers, robo calls, or in some cases, identity thieves and phone scam artist. Given the information about unwanted callers is available, this present invention comprises a method of providing this information to the user's device, so that unwanted callers and message senders can be recognized automatically and notified timely as such to the user (for example “Spam”), including but not limited to cases where the user has not stored them previously in their address book and the device or application has call and message log restrictions.